3DSLCCA - A Highly Scalable Very Low Bit Rate Software-Only Wavelet Video Codec

In the paper, our high performance significance-linked connected component analysis (SLCCA) image compression algorithm is extended to three-dimensional wavelet coding resulting in a highly efficient and scalable video codec termed 3DSLCCA. Advantageous features of 3DSLCCA include low computational complexity, rate, spatial, temporal, and SNR scalability, and prevention of error propagation at the price of acceptable degradation in both objective and subjective quality when compared to the state-of-the-art H.263 standard. INTRODUCTION Very low bit rate video coding has triggered intensive research in both academia and industry. The adopted ITU-T H.263 Recommendation which is specifically tailored for very low bit rate video coding [1] is the first standard to break the 64k bits-per-second (bps) barrier in audio-visual communications. The main application areas of H.263 are videoconferencing and videophony. Although H.263 provides acceptable visual quality, its widespread use is limite..